Tag: Saekano

Saekano after 6 episodes (dropped)

You can refer to my first post on Saenai Kanojo no Sodatekata here. Basically I thought the show had a bit of promise but didn’t want to wait every week for new episodes so I shelved it until it was complete and then some. 9 months later I finally settled down to watch the show, but…

As I said back then, I wanted to see what would happen when you added a third, ordinary character to a generic anime love triangle. The answer seems to be absolutely nothing. After episode 3 it seemed like best girl Megumi had won (or rather lost, since the hero Tomoya is so annoying), which was all good and nice, but then episode 6 rolls around and it’s all about Tomoya’s past, angsty non-relationship with Utaha-sempai? Where’d that come from? And who cares? It doesn’t matter any more. I thought best girl had won!

saekano dropped animefangirlI hate those series where the author spends a little time building a relationship between A and B, then no, no, C has a chance too, no wait, D too, and round and round and round it goes. When I sign up for a harem I know it’s a harem, so I’m ready for that whole rigamarole (that’s why I avoid harems these days actually) but I was hoping for something a little less stale and hackneyed with Saekano. More fool me, I guess. Basically I dropped Saekano because it turned out to be a harem when I wasn’t looking for a harem.

There’s a second reason, though, which is the visual novel Tomoya and his group are going to be making. The story was revealed around episode 5 and TBH it’s bad. Really bad. It starts well but then turns into a yandere incestuous reincarnation romance with giant monsters? If it’s supposed to be a parody of something famous (Eva? Titan?) then sorry, it flew clean over my head. And hopefully landed in the garbage dump, there to stay forever. And the characters are just falling over themselves gushing with praise about how moving it is. Are you kidding me? I wouldn’t even let my dog poop on a story like that. No thanks.

saekano ending sequence 2To recap, I can’t support the romance because it’s not going the way I wanted it to. And just btw, Tomoya is a lot more annoying than I remember. That ‘noisy passionate otaku’ gimmick was funny the first few times I saw it, but now it’s played out. His brief moments of seriousness only making the yelling more obnoxious, because then his whole otaku persona just seems put-on and fake. Just be a normal guy, okay? There’s only one good character in the whole show and I think Megumi would be better off walking away from this whole stupid circle.

Right, so to recap the romance sucks and the game they’re making sucks, so there’s nothing for me root for in Saekano. If I had nothing else to watch I might finish it out of sheer inertia, but my backlog is HUGE and growing larger all the time. If an anime isn’t really knocking my socks off after 6 episodes I think I’m better off just reading summaries online and moving on to something else. Saekano is best left to people who like otaku romances that probably won’t ever go anywhere, the end.

Saekano episodes 1-2 impressions. Kept for later.

At last! I found a Winter 2015 anime that I actually plan to pick up when it’s complete. I tried to avoid reading up on Saekano beyond what the title said (Saekano = short for ‘Saenai Kanojo/Heroine no Sodatekata’ = ‘How to turn a boring girl into a heroine’), so I almost quit when I accidentally started watching Episode 00 and it opened up with naked girls at an onsen. So not my kind of show at all. But the title intrigued me so I closed that episode and tried episode 01 instead.

A game-loving boy whose name I can’t remember picks up a girl’s hat and is struck by how magical the moment is (uh… he’s a teenager, I guess). He decides to make a romantic visual novel based on that moment and tries to recruit his generic tsundere childhood friend and his generic tall and snarky beauty friend to help him, but they turn him down. Then it turns out his dream girl with the beret is actually his dull unremarkable classmate whose name I also can’t remember, but I really like her. His goal now is to turn her into a heroine that will move hearts, or something bizarre like that.

saekano ep2All I need to motivate me to follow a show is to find one character I like and can latch on to, and that has come in the form of Heroine X (really can’t remember her name, can’t be bothered to look it up… Megumi?). She may seem boring at first, as per the title, but that’s because she’s the only normal person in a cast full of anime otaku/otaku stereotypes. The other girls’ personalities have been seen a thousand times before, same with main guy, so it’s interesting to throw a relatively normal person into the mix and see what happens.

Come to think of it, this series reminds me a lot of Bokutachi wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai, especially the sniping and bickering dynamic between the two lead girls. They even look similar, and the black-haired one keeps getting the better of the blonde one, who has a secret passion for pornographic material, and so on and so forth. I wouldn’t be surprised if Saekano started out as a “What if” scenario for that kind of series and took off from there. Let’s hope this doesn’t degenerate into a harem show and that it actually ends well.

It helps that I like video games and dating sims like Tokimeki Memorial so I don’t mind seeing the effort that goes into creating one of them. I enjoy video game parody anime too. If they could wrap this up in 12 episodes, maximum 24, that would be great. When the series ends I’ll watch episode 3 and 4 and marathon the rest if I still think it’s good at the point.